Customer awareness push

Citrix has launched a new branding program to help customers identify products by partners of the access infrastructure provider.

Citrix Ready is designed to help the firm's customers understand the impact products from its partners have on their IT systems. The new branding was announced at the Citrix iforum in Edinburgh on Tuesday.

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So far, Citrix has 37 of its partners involved in the branding program, covering 60 products. IBM and Dell have recently signed up to Citrix Ready and the business aims to have a total of 50 partners and 100 products signed up by the end of the year.

Dave Jones, Citrix's corporate vice president for business development, said the firm's relationships with its partner were critical to its business. Jones placed Citrix's partnership with Microsoft as a top priority to the company. "There is nothing more important to Citrix than the building and development of our relationship with Microsoft," he said, speaking with ENN.

Jones said the firm is placing a greater focus on providing information on partners through its website citrix.com. "We've always had information about partners on the website but in the past we didn't make it obvious," he said.

Last year the site received 80,000 hits specifically related to finding information on partners, while 1.5 million are expected in 2007.

The iforum was launched by Citrix's chief executive Mark Templeton. He told attendees that 66 per cent of the firm's customers had adopted its Presentation Server 4.0 product. The follow up, Presentation Server 4.5, has new functions including the ability to provide on-demand streaming of Windows applications. These services are designed to be accessed in much the same way as music or video on-demand files are accessed.

Templeton said the ease of use in functions such as these was critical to meeting the demands of younger users who are entering the workforce. "They are growing up with a whole different set of expectations [to those already in the workforce]," he said. "Organisations that aren't able to meet their needs won't be able to keep them as employees."

The Citrix iforum takes place on Tuesday and Wednesday in Edinburgh and ENN will have coverage of all major announcements at the conference.